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Michaela Muscat
Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi yesterday chastised callers on Radio 101’s Il-Fatti Kollha for making sweeping statements regarding foreigners and illegal immigrants, as callers passed remarks about ‘illegal immigrants’ making use of an internet café in South Street Valletta.
The callers’ grumblings eerily echoed Nationalist backbencher Franco Galea’s recent parliamentary adjournment speech in which he questioned the motives for the many foreigners, particularly African and Arab nationals, frequenting the internet cafés.
“We have to be careful about identifying these people, they aren’t necessarily illegal immigrants,” Gonzi told callers yesterday. “They will be communicating with other people like all other internet users,” he rationalised.
The Prime Minister assured listeners that 99 per cent of immigrants don’t want to come to Malta in the first place, saying that storms and faulty engines washed them up on our shores and that his government was working on a treaty with Libya and other Mediterranean countries for the repatriation of these immigrants. “The solution is to send them back home unless they are genuine cases.”
Gonzi said a formal agreement with Libya was taking long to materialise because Malta could not impose its will but had to negotiate an agreement with other states.
Callers yesterday poured praise over the Prime Minister as well as sending their blessings to the PN leader. In between thanking punters for including him in their prayers, Gonzi answered queries about current issues and listened to callers’ quick-fix solutions for all of Malta’s economic problems with reverential patience.
Gonzi yesterday also made surprising declarations over the future of hunting and trapping in Malta, particularly when he reassured a caller that “trapping will not stop after 2007.”
His statement yesterday contradicted a recent letter by the EU commissioner for the environment Stavros Dimas, to Malta’s environment minister George Pullicino, reminding him that “trapping will not be allowed after December 2008” with a few possible exceptions for finches.
The Prime Minister vouched that he was as always concerned with the “welfare of trappers and hunters” whilst recalling the negotiations which supposedly guarantee that hunters’ and trappers’ rights are safeguarded.
Moving onto a more volatile argument he warned against the people who had a “hidden and political agenda to confuse people with misinformation” about the government’s plans to enhance the Maltese environment with a golf course. Gonzi said that unlike these groups and people, he had the Maltese interest at heart and had taken every precaution to ensure that the garigue at the proposed area for development, ix-Xaghra l-Hamra in Ghajn Tuffieha, would not be destroyed.
This was Gonzi’s justification for having mapped out an area which is big enough for two golf courses: “We only need half the land, it was a conscious choice which will enable us to plan out a golf course which avoids terrain of environmental value like garigue.”
Gonzi also said that not all farmers who received a government notice for the expropriation of their land would in fact have their land expropriated. Part of the golf package would be a natural heritage park by the coastline for Maltese families to enjoy during weekends and holidays.
Before signing off the two-hour programme he thanked Parliamentary Secretary Tony Abela who had been “working extremely hard” on the reforms of the Armed Forces which “will reflect the needs and the realities of the present scenario”. Hailing September as the month where the culmination of the government’s work will be implemented, with the upcoming budget in the offing, he repeatedly told his audience to reflect on the hard effort exerted by his ministers. “You are walking on it, driving on it and seeing it,” he said.
michaelam@newsworksltd.com
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